New listing:360
Days in Active Worlds
following on to their successful "30 days" project last year. See
the shared architecture pages at A project from the Centre
for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London. Contact
Andy Smith.
Details: The project,
formally known as 30 Days in Activeworlds, was developed to explore and log
the growth of networked virtual space. By allowing tourists and citizens of
Activeworlds to build in our server a series of maps were developed, logging
the growth of the virtual world. A core community of users enthusiastically
built a number of large and complex structures using elaborate architectural
forms and investing a great deal of time. The pages carry details of the growth
of the world, a prize was awarded for the most innovative building during
the 30 Days, details are on the Winners page. Due to demand from the community
the project has been extended to encompass 360 Days in Activeworlds, with
the extension comes a number of new features and projects which will be taking
place in the original 30 Days virtual world.

Colleges
and Universities

University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art & Planning

DAAP in Active Worlds

Daap
is the virtual world of the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and
Planning at the University of Cincinnati. Daap has been used as an environment
to test models of sculpture and other three dimensional projects by
faculty, students, and guests of the college. Fine Art Media Fundamentals,
Modeling for 3 Dimensional Networking, and Computer Sculpture, are courses
which have been taught using Daap as a venue for the presentation of
student work.

The Art
Center College of Design in Pasadena, California's virtual world, accd
is designed by students as part of two courses, Virtual Worlds Theory
and Virtual Worlds Design, taught
by Michael Heim, author of Virtual Realism [Oxford University Press].

The
mcluhan world in Active Worlds is a new addition to the Virtual CoachHouse
Project of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. Using new
web technologies, the Virtual CoachHouse Unit endeavours to represent
or augment the ambience, activities, and culture of the coachhouse.
It will provide within the Virtual CoachHouse forums, creative and
productive 'work spaces', galleries, and new ways of representing
and accessing archived information.

Syracuse
University's School of Information Studies has been using the AskERIC
virtual classroom in The Palace for graduate instruction on campus distance
education. As part of their courses in Information Technology, students
collaborate in small groups in these virtual ienvironments using pictures
of themselves.

This demonstration virtual high school was built for the University
of California, Santa Cruz VHS Feasibility Study and features an office
with office hours, Spanish Wing, Science Lab with a chemistry simulation
in the "Student WebQuest Wing," and a gallery show on Geometry
and Art.This virtual high school demonstration
model was designed and built by Zg and Aurac of Active Arts Design and
its content and concept were developed by Bonnie DeVarco. The first
VHS was initiated and hosted by Stuart
Gold and Bruce Damer in TheU. Another
public version of the VHS demonstration model is now also in Zg world.

Led
by Margaret Corbit,The Cornell Theory
Center is building a virtual museum called SciCentre.
This museum will be a multi-user, interactive online world for science
education. This world is modeled on a cross between a conventional science
project and a World's Fair.

As part of Stanford University's Department
of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Problem/Project/Product/Process/People-Based
Learning is a process of teaching and learning that focuses on problem
based, project centered activities that produce a product for a client.
PBL will be based on re-engineering processes that bring people from
multiple disciplines together.

SciCity in Active WorldsThe website uses a graphical front end to let
visitors explore how science, engineering and technology affect their
everyday lives. The Scicity world takes this one step further, allowing
users to explore Science City in 3d for the first time. The Active Worlds
version of Science City is a 3d virtual representation of the site.

University of Washington
The Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab)

Virtual Playground - A Java 3D WorldThe Greenspace Project's Virtual Playground is an experimental
virtual environment concerned with the underlining hardware and software
issues of collaborative VR and with how humans will live and act in
this new environment. The Virtual Playground prototyped a new generation
of a shared virtual space, written completely in Java and using the
new Java3D API.

This educational
world called
"The Virtual City" is
an international
cooperative project between three schools in Europe.
Each building in The Virtual City has to have an educational function.
- "Since we are (as far as we know) the first schools in the world to
launch a project like this, there isn't anyone who has any experience
in creating the type of world that we need."

Virtual Charters -
the UK's first Virtual High School in Aurac world. Active Art Design,
winners of the 1998 TheU Architecture Competition to design a Virtual
University, donated the prize world to their local High School and have
been assisting the students and teachers in their first foray into cyberspace.
The school has decided to create a mixed environment with both real-life
and fantasy buildings. The world is still very much 'under construction',
but will be contain curriculum specific study areas which can be used
by both students and teachers to assist with both classwork and homework
assignments. The world features a replica of the main school building
and a Student Art exhibition which is housed in a purpose built hexagonal
gallery designed and curated by Geoff Kerrins

The Pacific0
world is a 3D virtual companion world to an hub for information on the
Pacific Ocean. High School students created and maintain this web site
and world for the 1998 ThinkQuest Competition.

SFX in Active WorldsThe
Boston Science Center has built a virtual world installation as part
of their new exhibition, Special Effects. The SFX world in Active Worlds
invites the general public to see a virtual companion exhibit similar
to the real exhibition in Boston. Exhibit visitors can go into AW through
a kiosk at the Museum. AW visitors and museum visitors to SFX world
can enjoy the virtual exhibition at the same time and see each other.

Circle
of Fire has worked closely with the San Jose Tech museum of Innovation
to design the Electronic Café in Active Worlds.The display, scheduled
to opening in October 1998 features 12 computer terminals hooked to
the intranet. The environments will allow museum users to interact within
rich environments designed for gaming and Entertainment applications.
See http://www.thetech.org/press_resources/communication.html
for an overview of this project.

NASA's public virtual version of the Ames Research Laboratory in Active
Worlds features many opportunities and activities for students online
and in 3D, including live outreach for groups of students to meet experts
in a Pathfinder course module and an exhibition linked to many pages
within the NASA Ames Research Lab's Home Site.

The
Centre for Advanced Learning Technologies (CALT), located in France
is increasingly regarded as Europe's leading R&D initiative in the
domain of advanced learning technologies for management education
and knowledge management. Their virtual world in Active Worlds is
public and serves as a virtual environment to test CALT's experimental
projects.

Virtualia
is an experiment in fractal-like surfaces and automated building, built
by Lucio Pascarelli, who is now designing a similar world for the Food
and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. This world is an
experiment to find ways to generate 3D surfaces from data for educational
purposes.

The
ATLAS gallery opened to the public on the 3rd of September 1998. They
hold regular seminars in the gallery where visitors can meet and chat
with the Atlas of Cyberspaces curator Martin Dodge and other cyber-cartographers,
asking questions on mapping and visualising Cyberspace. The gallery
currently contains three themed groups of pictures arranged around the
points of a compass. In the east we have maps using geographic metaphors,
in the west are images of 3D information space and lastly in the south
are information maps.

In early 1998 Stuart Gold directed a joint project of SRT
Enterprises, the Contact Consortium and
Circle of Fire in TheU to bring together 34 different teams in an architecture
competition in Active Worlds. Each team was given two months to design
and build a demonstration model for a Virtual University and three winning
entries were selected in Spring 1998. The judges included: Derrick Woodham,
Gerhard Schmitt, Hani Rashid, John Tiffin, Marcos Novak, Murray Turoff
and Stuart Gold.

The world
Aurac was built and designed by Aurac, HenrikG and Zg of the Active
Art Design Team and was the award winning entry in TheU Architecture
Competition to Design a Virtual University in 1998. Drawing on their
considerable experience with Active Worlds software, the team produced
a visually unique and influential learning environment. It included
the widely publicised Learning Towers, as well as a library, exhibition
hall and main reception building, complete with purpose-built lecture
theatre. This world was closed after the competition but was recently
resurrected by popular demand in the world Zg where it has since been
enhanced in the spirit of the original enterprise.